INTRODUCTION

In view of the immense complexity of the English article system, as well as its high level of difficulty, as discussed in the preceding chapters, the challenge facing learners of English as a second language seems considerable. The previous chapter has shown the numerous reasons why articles may cause difficulty for ESL learners, especially for those whose L1 contains no articles. As has already been mentioned, research findings confirm the significant difficulties that learners encounter with articles, but also provide information on other aspects of article acquisition and use. The overview below provides the most important facts about articles in L2 acquisition that have been established by researchers.

It should be noted here that information about the acquisition and use of articles is available from studies with a wide range of research topics, since any study dealing with learner language may gather information on the learners’ use of articles, among many other language features. This makes it impossible to consider every single study which mentions articles, and the review of literature presented in this chapter is necessarily selective, discussing mostly studies which are concerned primarily with articles, but also selected ones in which articles were not the main focus of inquiry.

CROSSLINGUISTIC ASPECTS

From the vast body of research on articles, the finding about articles in L2 English which emerges with by far the greatest robustness and clarity is the observation that learners who do not have an article system in their L1 find it more difficult to acquire articles in an L2. The first observations about the crosslinguistic effects of learners’ article use were made already in the early days of second language acquisition research. An important paradigm in the emerging field of applied linguistics, derived from Bloomfieldian linguistics, was that of contrastive analysis. Its basic assumption was that areas of difficulty in language learning can be identified and anticipated for speakers of a specific L1 on the basis of a comparison of the learner's language with the target language. The more different the rules were, the more problematic their learning was expected to be in an L2.